Like this:

The first thing people are likely to notice when they walk into the Palace Theatre on Broadway, where the new Tupac Shakur musical Holler If Ya Hear Me has just opened, is a lot of empty seats. Most of the orchestra section has been cleared out, and a new tier of stadium-style seating erected just above it, connecting with the mezzanine to make a smaller, more intimate theater space. But what about those unused seats? A refuge, I wondered, for the old-fogy theatergoers who might wander in by mistake and get driven out by the rough language, the rap music, the hard-edged ghetto ambience, the N-word?

Rap music and Broadway have had only passing encounters over the past two decades. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning In the Heights used rap music as a narrative device and a few off-Broadway shows — like the Shakespeare send-up The Bomb-itty of Errors and Matt Sax’s…

Like this:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — “Beautiful — The Carole King Musical” is obviously about the legendary singer-songwriter, but it’s also about growing up, says the Broadway actress who has earned a Tony Award nomination for playing King.

“It happens to be about Carole King, and it focuses on her life and a very specific journey she took as an artist, I think,” Jessie Mueller told CBS 2’s Dana Tyler. “She always knew she wanted to be a songwriter from a very, very young age, and she knew she was extremely talented. But from my understanding of it, I don’t think she ever knew that she was going to be the person bringing her songs to the world, which is eventually what happened.”